Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Yonge
-
Standard Name: Yonge, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Mary Yonge
Pseudonym: Aunt Charlotte
CY
was a staggeringly prolific author. Her more than two hundred works include domestic and historical novels for both adults and children, biographies, history and language textbooks, religious manuals, and a fragment of autobiography. She became famous without adopting many of the habits of the Victorian professional author: she published anonymously and donated most of her earnings to charity. Though her most successful titles remained household names for generations, many others in the Macmillan Uniform Edition were quickly forgotten.
Delafield, E. M., and Georgina Battiscombe. “Introduction”. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life, Constable and Company, pp. 9-15.
14
Her underlying purpose is always religious. Her biographer Georgina Battiscombe
writes that filial duty is her great theme, to which both love and common sense must be sacrificed.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company.
74-5
She advises submission as a Christian duty and not as an exclusively gendered ideal. She deals also in religious scruples and struggles: confirmation (as the climax of an education in spiritual self-examination) is often an issue for her characters.
RNC
published in three volumes Heriot's Choice: a Tale, which had first appeared serially in the Monthly Packet (edited by Charlotte Yonge
), between 1877 and this year.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press.
Hartnell, Elaine. Gender, Religion, and Domesticity in the Novels of Rosa Nouchette Carey. Ashgate.
20
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
Elaine Hartnell
argues that the reception of RNC
's work was tied somewhat to its modes and places of publication, notably her serialisation in journals edited by Ellen Wood
, Charlotte Yonge
, and Annie S. Swan
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
During her lifetime there was no shortage, in reviews of her novels in the popular press, of such adjectives as fresh, charming, and pretty, handy for quoting in listings of her works...
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
An article by Eliza Lynn Linton
written in June 1887 (well after the ebbing of RB
's early, scandalous reputation) judged that her books were always essentially love-stories, and nothing else,
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “Miss Broughton’s Novels”. Temple Bar, Vol.
80
, pp. 196-09.
203
but that without...
Reception
Mary Anne Barker
The Times, reviewing Sybil's Book in late 1873, found it both delightful and thoroughly original.
Gilderdale, Betty. The Seven Lives of Lady Barker. Canterbury University Press.
185
Betty Gilderdale
endorses this, calling it the first book to be published in England for teenage girls...
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
CFA
's husband
believed that Keble
endowed her with a sense of the magic, of the...